The Field Goal Dialectic

“Can’t you even tell a good tree from a poor tree?”
— Lucy Van Pelt, A Charlie Brown Christmas

Lucy puts the football down and then pulls it away at the last moment, leaving Charlie Brown sprawled across the lawn. Time after time, Charlie commits to the kick whole-heartedly, despite all evidence that the game is rigged. He’s going for the touchback. He throws himself into the task. Lucy cheats him. He tries again. Lucy pulls the ball away again. It’s downright sociopathic.

Anyone who was a good, productive worker at the beginning of 2008, but finds themselves on unemployment today — that “pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,” as Ronald Reagan so quaintly put it — probably feels a great deal of sympathy for poor Charlie. Those who side with Reagan probably find it funny. This football scene is a sort of paradigm for capitalism: a system of fairness, merit, and opportunity that easily, often, and by its own rules, implodes. When poor Charlie misses the ball during the homecoming game — again because Lucy pulls it away — it isn’t Lucy who gets the blame.

The façade of working class life has changed dramatically for most Americans over the last three decades. Working people are more likely to hold a service job today than a factory job, and to interact daily with people from across the economic spectrum. Opportunities for conspicuous consumption have been extended to small town and ghetto by malls and the Internet. Distinctions of high and low culture have all but been erased. Families of every income level watch “Survivor.” In talking about poetry and class, we’re trying to pin down social classes that are in more flux than usual, even by shifting American standards. Assume from the very beginning that this is, at best, a seriously flawed discussion.

Let’s think about being “poor” for a moment. Lucy contrasts the idea of a “good” Christmas tree with the “poor” one that Charlie bought. Here it’s unclear whether she intends poor in the sense of low-quality or in the sense of low-class. The tree is both. (Does it have to be both?) That in itself is telling: poor meant “not wealthy” long before it meant “of low quality,” and the pun is ingrained in American speech. The use of “good” is interesting as well. Much of the English-speaking world might use “nice” or even “fine” to impart a level of quality (although I would bet that the more American good has taken hold). The word good carries with it a whole array of ethical connotations, and Lucy’s is a uniquely American contrast: good things (or people) are not poor in either sense of the word. The so-called (and inaccurately-named) Protestant Work Ethic value system is reflected in / imposed by the language we casually use.

From this type of etymological historicization, one might assume that I’ll be expounding the virtues of various avant garde movements; that more radical poetry movements would be driven by working class poets, and would be identified as such. It makes good sense. However, in his book The Stamp of Class, Gary Lenhart offers a telling anecdote:

One evening [poet Eileen Myles and I] were chatting with two young editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in Jim Brodey’s kitchen on the Lower East Side, while everyone else crowded into Jim’s bedroom to watch the Academy Awards ceremony. The editors were bright, exciting young guys and everyone seemed to be invigorated by the company until one asked us where we had gone to college. When Eileen responded UMass-Boston, both replied that they knew it well. While at Harvard, they had spent many hours there “trying to organize the working-class kids.” They laughed as they recalled their naïve belief that the “working class” students would be more receptive to their organizing efforts than their Ivy League classmates. Instead, they had been confounded by what they deemed the apathy of students, and asked Eileen if she could explain. She did: “Of course we had little time for politics. We weren’t just going to school. Most of us had to work!” The subject was quickly changed and we found more amiable topics to talk about. But Eileen couldn’t forgive their faux pas.

Language Poetry, broadly speaking, was an attempt to dissolve the values and meanings of our every day, branded, capitalist use of language. Its Marxist-deconstructionist approach was intended to liberate from invisible chains of speech. It is, in some ways, the poetic equivalent of “trying to organize the working-class kids.” But in this form of the avant garde, and in so much of Marxism, the conceived identity of working class people is predicated by the organizers’ relationship to them: namely, their status as poor, as working people, as part of a category; their material productivity. Their identity is limited to class. Their individual concerns, traits, qualities, and values are made invisible by class.

It is easy for avant garde organizers to deny the validity of the constructed self exactly because they have no uncertainty about their own self-hood. They project embarrassment and class-based self-consciousness at working people: to be middle-class and above is good in America, but being poor is poor. There is an almost algebraic identity principle at work — an airtight loop that seems like it can’t be broken from the outside.

Organizers, like the Ivy League editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, can’t fathom why working people would balk at revolution. Apathy and skepticism astound them. But aside from the practical problems — “Most of us had to work!” — a cultural revolution like this isn’t winning, it’s changing the game. Charlie Brown doesn’t want to win at soccer. He doesn’t want to undermine the system of repression. He doesn’t want to play another game. Charlie wants to kick the fucking football.

Even though he knows it’s rigged. That’s the dialectic at work. These avant garde movements aren’t bad, and I don’t want to imply that this is any sort of critical take-down. But the assumption that they accurately express a working class ethos is seriously flawed. These types of revolutionary movements, social and artistic alike, are so often grounded in projections of value at the people they’re trying to “save.” Rarely do they express the values and ideas of the damned themselves.

I had the idea of comparing Charles Bukowski’s “like a flower in the rain” to Fredrick Seidel’s “Fucking,” two poems of similar content and similar style, and opposing poles of class; and maybe comparing Eileen Myles to Adrienne Rich. But I hesitate to boil these questions down that way, to make too much of much too little. The fluidity of American economics, the way families are always rising or falling, infantilizes the nineteenth century language of class that we’ve all inherited, much the same way, in public debate, fairness is used as a childish simplification of the more difficult idea of justice. The idea of a class structure used by people who care about class is a gross oversimplification. Hand-picking a few easy comparisons would be rigging the game. I would rather raise the question of class in poetry in its infuriating complexity. The questions do matter, because the articulation of values is part and parcel of aesthetics: a poem sits on the shelf just like a Bible does.

What does it mean that I purposefully dropped my accent in college? That I gave in to the middle class kids who, very amicably, ragged on me about it and called me Good Will Hunting? College socialized me out of my class roots. Sometimes I wonder whether I lost my real voice in the process. I wonder whether John “Junkets” Keats felt the same way, and how we can possibly connect Keats to D.H. Lawrence to Charles Bukowski to Robert Pinksy (all Eurpoean men, I know: apples to apples). I wonder whether working class poets get critical lip service only if they conform to stereotypes, set the right kind of scenes, use lower-class slang, act poor. If they don’t, and class gets widely ignored, are the poems still working class? Should we measure working class aesthetics by pathos, as is so often the case? Can you even tell a good poem from a poor poem?